TPF Grant Progress Report: March 2014

This past May, The Perl Foundation awarded a grant to fund development of a couple features in Pinto. Pinto is a robust tool for curating a private repository of CPAN modules, so you can build your application with the right modules every time. This is my fifth progress report on that work.

Pinto 0.0995 was just shipped to CPAN and it includes a merge command. At the moment, it is only capable of doing a fast-forward merge (that is, when the target stack hasn't changed since you last forked or merged it). I still plan to support other types of merges, but I actually think fast-forward merging will cover the majority of scenarios.

Most of the time, stacks are short-lived. You make a copy of the stack, upgrade some packages, and then build your app. If your tests fail, you probably throw the new stack away and stay with your current packages. If your tests pass, then you immediately merge the new stack back into the original.

This release also contains reset and revert commands that are similar (but not identical) to the same commands you find in git. All the new commands are experimental, so the interface and behavior are subject to change.

So I'm not calling the grant work "done" just yet. Once these new commands have been battle-tested a bit, then we'll see where things stand.